Dali, Calder, Avatar, and iPads

Left, sculptor and artist Alexander Calder. Photograph by George Hoyningen-Huene. Right, Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs demonstrates the iPad at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on January 27, 2010 in San Francisco, California. Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

This month New York City has two photo exhibitions devoted to flamenco dance (at the Aperture Gallery and at Amster Yard’s Instituto Cervantes), one about jazz (at Lincoln Center’s Library for the Performing Arts) and several that focus on fashion. Pianist Fred Hersch recently told the Times that he has completed “a song cycle about art and photographic images.” And literary scholar Peggy Samuels has just published Deep Skin (Cornell University Press), a probing examination of the way painters such as Klee and Calder helped shaped the form and substance of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry.This should come as no surprise, this squall of art and music and criticism influenced by other art forms. Everywhere we look, artists in the multi-media age are multi-tasking, cross-pollinating, borrowing from peers with abandon—to the point where the so-called arts community has begun to resemble the mash-up-and-MeetUp equivalent of the salons of the last century, which thrived by welcoming all manner of poet and provocateur.

What’s more, our platforms for expression appear to be shape-shifting as new devices deliver us more graphically compelling content, changing the nature of how we encounter the stories we absorb: we hear our books as podcasts, attend our concerts online in real-time, download our videos onto iPhones. Interactive art installations can play out like video games or performance pieces or encounter sessions. Thanks to Avatar, there will soon be a boom in 3-D films (and films converted to 3-D). And in the coming months, the iPad will deliver the digital edition of Vanity Fair, embedded with video, audio, and slideshows.

With every so-called content creator wondering who on earth will underwrite the cost of producing all of these new works for these myriad media platforms, there still seems to be a promising upside to it all, a Calder-esque sense of buoyancy and promise that is settling upon this enveloping ether. And amid the chaos, one of the best ways to survive and thrive is to mimic the crazy natives. So, inevitably, the lines are blurring between choreographer and design director, novelist and curator, photographer and filmmaker, broadcaster and Webcaster. And that always leads to remarkable, and possibly groundbreaking, results.

No wonder, then, that this week HBO has rolled out “Funny or Die Presents” (an amalgam of Website-inspired videoclips) and “The Ricky Gervais Show,” a radio show recast as a podcast recast as an animated cable series. No wonder, either, that jazz composer Ted Nash has just released an audio tour de force, the CD “Portrait in Seven Shades,” a suite of jazz interpretations of the works of iconic artists. His “Monet,” “Picasso,” and “Pollock” movements are particularly evocative. And his piece entitled “Dali”—if you listen closely—reminds us that long before the Internet age, the Dadaists insisted, rightly so, that we could actually see with our ears.